The reason most people love D’Elia’s Grinders, the 70-year-old sandwich shop in Riverside, also happens to be the reason plenty of people hate it, too.
The family-owned Italian deli has been baking its own bread since it opened and that bread isn’t your typical soft sandwich roll, made ubiquitous by every deli franchise from Subway to your local Safeway. D’Elia’s bread has a crisp, almost flaky exterior and its owners get complaints that the bread is stale on almost a daily basis. At the same time, they get just as many devotees begging them to open a location in a neighboring state.
“Our Achilles heel, our blessing and our curse, is our bread,” co-owner Brian Perrone said…